The centenary of the birth of Hugh MacDiarmid - and the Scottish renaissance

But before there was Hugh MacDiarmid, there was Christopher Murray Grieve, who was born and grew up in Langholm, the small town at the confluence of three rivers, the Wauchope, the Esk and the Ewes, just eight miles north of England.

MacDiarmid later wrote that he could tell exactly where he was in Langholm simply by listening to the sound of the rivers. Their moving waters each had a different music. He writes of “the honey-scented heather hills” and the forests and moors surrounding the town, which he explored as a boy.

But his love extended from the natural world of rivers, hills and forests to the other end of the spectrum, to book learning. His father was the local postman and the family lived below the town library.

MacDiarmid (above) claimed that when he left Langholm he had read every single book in that library and knew what was in every one of them. Both book learning and the natural world were there from the start. And there was the annual Common Riding, the traditional summer festival the Riding of the Marches, when a large company of riders gallop around the boundaries of Langholm’s territory in a tradition centuries old, marking the border of their provenance. In later life, MacDiarmid returned for it as often as he could.

It is 130 years since the birth of Chris Grieve in 1892 and 100 years since MacDiarmid first appeared. It’s 60 years since Iain Crichton Smith published “Deer on the High Hills”, his extended sequence of poems, meditations on the natural world of the Highlands and islands he favoured as a boy growing up in Lewis, thinking of the relations of perception between human beings and the natural fauna and flora of the world beyond humanity.

It’s 50 years since the establishment of the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow in the same year as the publication of the first book by Liz Lochhead, Memo for spring. It’s only 10 years since, in 2012, the Scottish Government ruled that Scottish literature would be a secured provision to be taught in every school in Scotland.

These anniversaries are significant milestones in the story of Scottish literature as the subject has been re-imagined, re-invented, repurposed and regenerated over the course of the last century and more. That idea of regeneration is essential. Renaissance is the word.

The sociologist, town planner and biologist Patrick Geddes published an essay entitled “The Scots Renascence” in his periodical The Evergreen, in the spring of 1895, declaring the prospect of a self-determined “Renascence” in Scotland which would engage the cultural and political desire for liberation from 19th-century Anglocentrism and British imperialism.

The title of Geddes’s journal was a direct reference to Allan Ramsay’s anthology of 1724, The Ever Green, itself followed by David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes’s Ancient Scottish Poems (1770) and John Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems, Never Before in Print but now published from the MS. Collections of Sir Richard Maitland … comprising pieces written from about 1420 till 1586 (1786). These books republished poems from the 16th century and earlier, regenerating an awareness of a longer tradition of Scottish literature than might have been suspected in the immediate aftermath of the Union of 1707.

The poet William Jeffrey published a positive review of CM Grieve’s anthology Northern Numbers: First Series entitled “Is this a Scottish poetry renaissance?” in the Glasgow Bulletin, January 17, 1921 and Grieve himself stated boldly: “The next decade or two will see a Scottish Renascence” in his own magazine, Scottish Chapbook, in August 1922. The French scholar Denis Saurat picked this up in an article entitled “Le Group de ‘la Renaissance Ecossaise’” in the Revue Anglo-Americaine in April 1924.

The artist William Johnstone, in his autobiography Points in Time (1980), wrote that in the 1920s, he and his cousin the composer Francis George Scott and his family often holidayed in Montrose, where MacDiarmid / Grieve and his wife Peggy had their home. Scott and MacDiarmid (pictured below) would get together for epic conversations about poetry, music and the artistic regeneration they both saw as essential to a revitalised Scotland. Johnstone described Scott becoming “greatly excited by what he saw as the possibility of a splendid revival, a Scottish Renaissance of the arts".

“We three were to be the core of this Renaissance. He felt that if we all pulled our weight together and tried, Christopher with his poetry, I with my painting and Francis with his music, all having a revolutionary point of view, we could raise the standard of the arts right from the gutter into something that would be really important.”

It was to be “a great resurgence of art in Scotland”.

Throughout the First World War, Patrick Geddes had held the Chair of Botany at University College Dundee, from 1888 to 1919, then went to India to occupy the Chair of Sociology at the University of Bombay from 1919 to 1924.

In 1925, he was back in Edinburgh, chairing and introducing what was perhaps the first public reading MacDiarmid gave, from his first book of poems, Sangschaw, in October 1925, at Ramsay Gardens beside the Outlook Tower at the top of the Royal Mile, just below the Castle, and FG Scott played his piano settings of some of MacDiarmid’s poems.

When Chris Grieve was a wee boy in Langholm, Scott had been his English teacher. Now, after the war, they had reconnected in a major ambitious drive towards artistic recovery. MacDiarmid later recollected that when he’d been at school, Scott had administered corporal punishment on at least one occasion.

He said he could not remember what he’d done but he was certain he would have deserved it. He and all his classmates were undoubtedly delinquents, he said, and Langholm was a wild and woolly place to group up in then.

So precisely the kind of “Renascence” that Geddes had envisaged in 1895 was being initiated 30 years later, at this meeting in 1925. And the point is that the First World War, the Easter Rising in Ireland and the Russian Revolution had forced it through. These bloody upheavals had forced populations to reconsider what they were fighting for and had made possible a new vision from the dead ground of their devastations. According to Geddes’s son Arthur, Patrick and he had read MacDiarmid’s poems in their home in Montpellier, France, in the French literary periodical Les Nouvelles Littéraires (which began publishing in 1922), and Patrick had written to MacDiarmid to introduce himself: hence the meeting.

On October 19, shortly after the reading, Geddes wrote to Grieve: “More & more there is growing on me the possibility of strengthening all our scattered movements of synthetic & constructive & progressive character – whether regional, literary, scientific, artistic, economic or social etc, by trying to bring them together, & thus increasingly present them as each part of a synthetic movement, reaching out beyond the chaos-Babel of current action & thought so apparently predominant.”

In his autobiographical book of essays, The Company I’ve Kept, MacDiarmid wrote: “This re-awakening of the vital and the organic in every department undermines the authority of the purely mechanical. Geddes’s prime significance lies in the fact that he was one of the greatest prophets and pioneers of this change.”

It was not an easy road. Grieve had seen service during the First World War in Salonika in Greece, in France and in the Pyrenees, and was invalided out with cerebral malaria, spending the 1920s mainly in Montrose as a working journalist. But he made so many enemies among the establishment that he became virtually unemployable. Things were looking desperate.

In 1933, with his second wife Valda and their young son Michael, he relocated to the Shetland archipelago, in extreme poverty, under physical and mental strain, but he produced some of his greatest poetry through what he called this ‘halophilous living by the cold northern seas’ (a halophile being a creature that only survives in an atmosphere of salt).

After returning to mainland Scotland in 1941, conscripted into National Service, MacDiarmid spent years at various impermanent homes, mainly in Glasgow, through and after the Second World War. In 1951, Chris and Valda were given occupancy of the cottage of Brownsbank, just outside Biggar, rent-free, by the benevolent farming family who owned it, the Tweedies. Here they were to live together until MacDiarmid’s death in 1978, and Valda alone until her own death, in 1989.

In 1952, MacDiarmid published Francis George Scott: An Essay on the Occasion of his Seventy-fifth Birthday. This little book of tribute takes us back to the intensity of cultural work, the work of the composer and teacher, whose example brought the folk tunes and tones of Scotland and the modernity of Schoenberg and Bartók into new configurations. Scott’s work was lonely, solitary, dedicated, inspirational in his achievement, insight and integrity, an affirmation of artistic priorities bridging the decades across two world wars.

In Langholm, the exhibition of portraits by Sandy Moffat, landscapes by Ruth Nicol and my poems centres on the long, deep influence of MacDiarmid’s early years on his later life and work, paying due attention to the importance of Francis George Scott, and William Johnstone.

Poet, musician, painter: this triumvirate of the arts generated a vision that was the essence of the Scottish Renaissance, Scotland regenerated, politically, culturally, newly self-determined. We live in the illumination of that vision.

The Langholm Initiative, which aims to raise £2.2 million to buy a additional 5300 acres of Langholm Moor, needs all the support you can give. Its Tarras Valley Nature Reserve is – and will be – for those now and still to come a self-renewing resource, the only really reliable foundation for our independence. Renaissance is regeneration.

The initiative’s website is at www.langholminitiative.org.uk

The Langholm Moor Second-Stage Community Buyout crowdfunder is at www.gofundme.com/f/langholm-moor-community-buyout-2